A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Moon in a Shoebox

A story in the Los Angeles Times on "NASA's early lunar images, in a new light" celebrates an unsung archivist heroine who managed to save 2,000 images from five missions to the moon that were in danger of being destroyed, since the technology that could read them had become obsolete. It also details the role that the NASA Watch blog played in publicizing the saga and how fan culture and amateur astronomy provided attention to preservation of the images, which were ultimately processed by tinkerers working with salvaged FR-900s in an abandoned McDonald's in the unlikely scene shown above. Video of the "McMoon" facility was apparently pulled from YouTube on the grounds of a "copyright claim by a third party."